Abstract

The ability to identify and track visually interesting
regions has many practical applications – for example, in image
and video compression, visual marketing and foveal machine
vision. Due to challenges in modeling the peculiarities of human
physiological and psychological responses, automatic detection of
fixation points is an open problem. Indeed, no objective methods
are currently capable of fully modeling the human perception
of regions of interest (ROIs). Thus, research often relies on user
studies with eye tracking systems. In this paper we propose a costeffective
and convenient alternative, obtained by having internet
workers annotate videos with ROI coordinates. The workers use
an interactive video player with a simulated mouse-driven fovea,
which models the fall-off in resolution of the human visual system.
Since this approach is not supervised, we implement methods for
identifying inaccurate or malicious results. Using this proposal,
one can collect ROI data in an automated fashion, and at a much
lower cost than laboratory studies.